#and when my hair was a dark pink and a bit longer i got gerard way

[kirj-of-perversion]

Billy Again (Part 1)

His whole life, Four has brought death and bad luck wherever he went. Now that he is no longer alive maybe his luck will change, especially surrounded by people who love him as much as he does them.

Or a story about Four’s  Many names

A/n: This is for @billytheskywalker​‘s awesome quote challenge! The quote I chose is “Here we are, born to be kings. We are princes of the universe.” Hope you guys like it, the formatting may be a bit weird, you can also read it on ao3 here

Word count: 5.4k

1. Billy

Four and Five were sitting on top of a roof.

That almost sounds like the start of a nursery rhyme, doesn’t it? The setting was right too, everything feels soft and fragile at sunrise. The sun looked almost shy as it peaked from under the earth, a faded red, the sky was pink and five was bathed in golden light.

They were sitting close but not touching, and there, in the cold morning air, Four could almost feel the heat radiating off of her skin. She was so close; if he shifted just the slightest bit he’d be able to press the line of his thigh against hers.

“-at’s why I got into medical school.”* He was only half-listening as she told him about her life before the whole fake death thing, they'd been trading stories for half an hour. He hated it, talking about his life before felt like playing with fire. But he’d never been able to deny her anything, or any of the ghosts for that matter.

“What about you, Billy?” Billy, he still wondered why he told them that damned nickname, why not William, or Bill, even Will; he’d been called each of those at one point or another.

“What do you want to know?” He smiled at her, couldn't help himself, even though talking about himself almost physically hurt.

“What’s your earliest memory?”

He hummed, deep in his chest, wondering how much he should tell her.

“My earliest memory, yeah? I think it was falling off the roof of my childhood home.” She punched him on the shoulder, giggling (and wasn’t that a thought? Five, their badass doctor, giggling.)

“You’re totally lying.”

“I’m not, I swear! My mum was so mad I could almost see the steam coming out of her ears. But it didn’t matter to me, the next day I was back on that roof, I’ve been climbing for as long as I can remember.”

She laughed, throwing her head back and he almost felt guilty for lying to her.

But after so many lies, so much secrecy, there were things he couldn't help but keep to himself, no matter how much he loved them all.

His actual first memory was of his mother, being held in her arms as a storm thundered outside. Her usual scent of clean clothes and lavender all around him and her quiet whisperings swallowed up by the darkness around them. He remembered with startling clarity the pain of his black eye, feeling it pulsate, and the words of his drunkard father.

Useless. Good for nothing. Dumb.

And yet, the pain hadn’t been so bad there. Curled up in his bed with his mother as she consoled him, late at night after his father had fallen asleep.

“You’re gonna do great things, my little lamb. Oh, Billy, people like you, born with stars in their eyes are meant to be great kings or rulers. One day you’ll see, the whole world will know who you are.”

He had barely believed her, back then. Even less so, a few years later, on his ninth birthday, newly orphaned and watching the still-hot cinders of his childhood home.

At that moment, he knew, he was destined to misfortune.

2.William

At the age of nine, with no relatives to be found and no will left by his parents, Four was sent to foster care. He lasted two weeks in the system before running away from his foster “parents” and never looking back.

Those two weeks were hellish, as Four constantly switched hands and institutions. Surprisingly, nobody wanted the bruised little kid who had night terrors that woke him up screaming and shaking every single night. The state-mandated therapist he saw only twice asked what the nightmares were about and he told her they were about the house fire (they weren’t, all he saw in his sleep were his father’s fists).

And they all kept calling him that, William, like he was a pet they had named. Nobody asked, it was just William here, William there. William was this new boy, a boy alone in the world whom no one would ever truly care for. Just another child of the system. And yet. And yet, a tiny part in him was relieved, because his heart seized in his chest whenever he thought about being called Billy, like he was disrespecting his mum, who had had so much faith in him.

He knew he would never be able to accomplish whatever hopes she’d had for him.

Midway through the second week, he was sent to the Whites, an idyllic little family with a charming father, a smiling mother, a little girl two years younger than him and a dog. They were nice, too much so, telling him they wanted to welcome him into their family.

“Hello, William, it’s great to have you with us. I’m sure you’ll feel right at home.” Said Mrs. White, running a silk-soft hand through his hair.

For three days he waited for the other shoe to drop, for the charming Mr. White to drink a beer too many and hit him. But he never did, instead, Mr. White (“it’s Gerard, kiddo”) called him champ and big boy, and tossed around a ball with him in the backyard. It was unsettling.

Billy’s father had been a charming man too, everyone liked him. He smoked cigars and laughed like thunder and everyone loved him. (“Oh Billy, why don’t you like your dad? He’s so nice!”).

So as nice as Mr. White was, Four, didn’t trust him. In his experience fathers weren't nice, at least not to their children. Instead, he tottered behind Mrs. White (“It’s Veronica, honey, or mum if you prefer”) and little Elysia, enamored by their twin heads of dark curls.

Mrs. White was nice too, prettier than his own mother and just as charming as Mr. White. She’d kiss his forehead at night and tell him and Elysia stories. She was strict but fair, assigning the children chores and explaining to Four how important homework would be once they got him enrolled in school.

For a few days, Four harbored a tiny flicker of hope. Of course, the universe promptly crushed it.

On the fourth day (And how’s that for an unlucky number?) Four dropped a glass of milk and Mrs. White slapped him across the face, her long nails catching on his skin and drawing blood. Elysia stood in the corner, watching them with wide eyes and a trembling lip as her mother devolved into a screaming fit.

“How dare you?! How dare you disrespect my family and my home like this?! We didn’t have to take you in you idiot!” Four stayed silent, looking her in the eyes as fat tears rolled down his cheeks.

She sent him to his room without dinner but instead of falling asleep he grabbed a plastic bag and shoved in the little belongings the Whites had bought for him, still crying, but furrowing his brows in determination.

Fathers, he decided, were not the only bad people there were. Mothers could be evil too, anyone really. And if parents could be so wicked, then he didn’t need them.

Not anyone.

He climbed out of the window with practiced ease, after years and years of climbing all over his own home. He slipped away on silent feet, distantly hearing Mrs. White berate her own daughter and husband.

After that, it was the streets, and Four learned about hunger, he learned how it felt to think you were going to die, for the first time in his life. Sure, at first people were willing to spare a few quarters for the cute little kid sitting on the curb, but as he got dirtier and scragglier they started shooing him away and shooting him dirty looks.

He ate fast food as often as he could, washed his face in McDonald´s sinks and changed into the least dirty of his clothes as much as possible, but he was still miserable. He felt weak all the time and he was just so tired.

And then he learned to steal.

3.Bill

Here’s the thing, most people are good at at least a couple of things, some talent is just innate and if you hone it enough then things start to get intense. And Four? He was good at stealing. Then again, stealing was more of an effect brought on by his talent at climbing and running, at moving.

He’d discovered parkour at twelve and started seeing the world differently. Everything, everything as just a way of enhancing movement, of being faster of getting just the slightest bit closer to the sky. He started moving all around England sometimes learning a trick or two from older guys who were like him. Fast and feeling the urge to move and bend reality around him like a constant urge under their skin.

So Four was good.

And people began to take notice.

Four was fourteen years old (and surely, whatever god there is must have laughed themself silly at the recurring number), and sitting on a roof, letting his feet dangle, eating a warm bagel when he heard footsteps behind him. Immediately he jumped to his feet, turning around and wiping the crumbs away from his lips. He’d met a wide arrange of people who hung out on roofs like him, but usually, there was some semblance of etiquette. The way this person had approached him and gotten so close before announcing his presence was just unnerving.

“Who are you?”

The stranger tilted his head to the side; he was half a head taller and probably a couple of years older than Four, with a generous smattering of freckles on his nose and dark, nearly reddish eyes.

“So you’re the little blonde kid who’s been stealing around town?”

Four bristled, he wasn't a kid!

“So what if I am?”

The kid gave him a cocky smile and extended a hand for Four to shake. Four didn’t move and the stranger shrugged before putting his hands in his pockets.

“My name’s Engel, what’s yours?”

Four took a wary step back, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he was at a disadvantage, only a couple inches away from a three-story fall, backed into a corner by Engel.

“Why should I tell you?”

Engel’s smirk widened, the look in his eyes nearly cat-like.

“Because, I’ve got a job offer for you, pretty boy.”

Four barely caught himself before taking another step back, instead tilting his chin upwards stubbornly.

“Don’t call me that!”

“Then tell me what I should call you.”

He bit his lip and his fingers unconsciously crushing the bagel. What was he supposed to answer to that? True, he was no longer Billy, but William felt crushingly unnatural. He looked Engel in the eyes.

“B-Bill. My name’s Bill.”

Engel smiled with an emotion Four couldn’t decipher and again extended his hand for Four to shake, taking a step closer.

“Nice name, kid. Now I’ve heard you’re good at stealing, and I want you to join my team.”

Engel's hand was warm as Four shook it.

Apparently, the group wasn’t actually Engel’s team, he was just a member who, like the others deferred to the eldest guys, a pair of twenty-year-old twins who didn’t bother introducing themselves to Four. He later found out through the grapevine that their names were Zaccai and Arlo, both sported shaved heads and looked bored nearly all the time. They only seemed to come alive during robberies.

Stealing with this team was completely different from the petty stuff Four usually did. The robberies were each carefully planned and they changed cities much more often than Four did, even countries. In his time with the twins, he traveled through most of Europe. The targets were also much bigger, even if the twins took the majority of the money. Four was sure that they could have retired with a mansion whenever they wanted, but they simply enjoyed their line of work too much.

The “team” was more than anything else, a gaggle of young people without any real organization, the members came and went as they pleased. Four never took off on his own but he sometimes accompanied Engel when he needed help with a side job. Sometimes Engel would leave him alone for weeks at a time and Four would wait anxiously, ignoring the rest of the team until he returned. Whenever anyone took too much time to report back, the twins wrote them off as dead and everyone got a free afternoon to wander off for a while.

The first time this happened, Four looked at Engel with wide eyes but the older one just gave him a bitter smile.

“That’s how things go in this line of work, Bill. You better get used to it.”

Engel was also the first one who put a gun in his hand. Four had been sixteen for two weeks and had finally grown a couple of inches taller than Engel. It was a handgun, small but unbelievably heavy in Four’s palm. Of course, he’d seen that most everyone carried at least one gun whenever they stole something but he’d never imagined he’d have to too. Everyone else did parkour but he was the best one, it was his thing and the reason Engel had recruited him, he didn't understand why he needed a gun like the others.

“You’re fast, Bill. But no that fast. You can’t outrun a bullet, the only way to stop it is to kill the other guy first.” A wink. “And I need you to cover my back too. You and me, yeah?”

And so, Billy learned, every day he would stand for hours, shooting targets until his arms were sore and he could barely keep his eyes open. But no matter how much he trained his muscles he never could bring himself to shoot anyone. His self-appointed mentor also taught him to fight, on dusty gymnastics mats the twins kept around in their hideouts. Engel would always win, but Billy was good too, fast and electric, wiggling out of chokeholds like an eel. But he never fought dirty enough for Engel’s taste.

“You’ve gotta go harder, Bill! Those guys out there are not gonna have any compassion when they’re fighting you. They’re gonna go in for the kill and if you don’t do the same, they’re gonna succeed.”

Four was seventeen, lying on those mats, sweat-slick and breathing heavy, when Engel kissed him. It was a hungry kiss, the kind that builds up for years and uncoils like an explosion. The kind of kiss where you feel the raw need in the base of your stomach, where air stops mattering. And you just want. They started… something after that, kissing in empty corridors and jacking each other off in dark alleyways, quieting their moans into each other’s necks. Four would never forget Engel’s face as he came, head thrown back and flushed cheeks, hair wild.

Despite it all, they never actually fell in love, Four didn’t at least. And Engel would still leave for weeks at a time, leaving him alone and burning. They started drinking together, sleeping with girls when the other wasn’t there and partying hard.

Meanwhile, their little skirmishes kept getting riskier, as Zaccai acquired a manic look in his eyes he hadn’t had before and Arlo kept shooting him worried looks when he thought no one was watching.

Suddenly one day, when Four was nearly twenty-one and easily a head taller than Engel, Zaccai announced he had decided he wanted to steal the Moussaief Red Diamond. At that moment, that meant nothing to Four, but he later found out it was the seventh most expensive diamond in the world, owned by a man named Shlomo Moussaief who lived in London. While everyone was extremely excited at the prospect of being set for life, late at night they could hear the twins argue in their room.

“We can’t do this Zaccai! We don’t have the manpower!”

“Don’t you see it?! It’s the ultimate challenge, the ultimate proof of skill!”

“You’re crazy! You’ve gone crazy, and I’m not letting you drag me down with you!”

Arlo stormed out of the abandoned apartments where the team had been squatting, leaving behind a string of worried whispers and bubbling panic. Zaccai smiled at them when he stepped out of the room.

“Don’t worry guys, we can do it without. When we pull this off, I promise you, we’re gonna become legends! We’re gonna be rich!”

Four shot a worried look at Engel, but the latter had a nearly identical look on his face to Zaccai, a demented smile, slashed across his face.

“Hear that, Bill? Rich. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Engel the millionaire.”

And so they prepared like they hadn’t ever before, scanning the building to find entrances and exits, paying for intel about the security personnel.

Finally, the day came when they silently entered the deceptively modest house where Moussaief lived, Zaccai at the helm.

And promptly walked into Hell.

It was obvious from that first moment that they had been given wrong intel or someone had ratted them off because they were immediately shot at. Men started dropping like flies in both sides of the fight, the sound of shooting deafening as Four gripped his gun so hard his knuckles turned white. They ran across hallways, Four’s teammates constantly shooting and dropping to flour, screaming with pain. Only Zaccai’s laughter rose above the rest of the noise.

“The diamond! Just get the diamond!”

There were only five of them when they finally got to the showroom, only to find it completely empty.

Of course.

Moussaief had probably flown out of town if not out of the country as soon as he'd been tipped off that something was brewing. And he's taken his fortune with him.

Zaccai stopped laughing; face blanching for just a moment before it exploded as they shot him in the head. The only lasting guard walked into the room and promptly shot the rest of Four’s teammates. He felt his heart stop as he watched almost in slow motion, the bullet headed for Engel’s chest. In just a couple of seconds he felt it all, nausea and sadness. And blinding anger.

He raised the gun, and shot, aiming directly at the man’s heart.

Bull’s eye.

The man fell to the floor, his last scream getting stuck in his throat.

Four shot again. And again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and ag-

“Bill!”

What?

“Bill!”

His hands began shaking, the gun clattering to the floor.

“I’m fine! It was just a graze.”

For a moment he stared uncomprehendingly at Engel’s blood-streaked side.

“You okay, man?”

He looked into Engel’s dark eyes, feeling numb as the older boy cupped his face with both hands.

“It’s okay, Bill. He’s dead. I’m fine.”

Four threw himself at Engel, winding his arms around his neck. He didn’t sob or make a sound, just shook as Engel rocked him from side shushing him softly. When he was slightly calmer, he and Engel took the fire escape to walk onto the roof, stepping over bodies, staining the soles of their shoes with blood.

Over them, the moon was nearly nonexistent, just a thin ribbon of light. Four licked his cracked lips before speaking.

“So, what next?”

Engel clapped him on the shoulder, pressing a hand against his injured side.

“Wanna go to Ukraine?”

4.Will

On the day they arrived in Ukraine, the day was overcast.

It was a few weeks after the failed Moussaief thievery, they had waited for Engel’s side to heal up, but Four was still wary of the new group they were going to meet. Apparently, they were friends of Engel that he sometimes helped for a little extra cash, though working for the twins had been more profitable. It stung, that in all the years of knowing each other, Four had never met them.

Besides, he didn’t want to belong to a team anymore. A team meant dead-weight and room for error, a team meant caring for too many people. Usually, Four thrived in variables. How many variables and different paths did the landscape have to offer? Human variables, though, he wasn’t so keen on.

When he voiced his opinions to Engel, the latter just laughed.

“They’re good guys, Bill. Well, as good as you’re gonna get for a bunch of thieves anyway.”

Kyiv was beautiful with high buildings made of white stone dark, lanky silhouettes of unlit lampposts. But Engel immediately led him to the bad side of town, where the buildings barely stood and the people lived on the streets. The smell of poverty was intense, but Four didn’t mind it, it had become home. The group had been living in an abandoned house, with no glass on the windows and peeling paint. Cigarette butts littered the ground outside.

The group inside was much smaller than Four expected, nothing like the twins’ group. There were only eight or nine people, sitting on metal folding chairs, the floor, and an ugly couch, around a deck of cards and three bottles of vodka. The first one to get up was the only girl, tiny and ballerina-like, with bird-boned wrists and lean strong muscle lining her arms. She raised an eyebrow playfully and fixed with an intense look in her dark, dark eyes. The other’s got up slowly, nothing remarkable about them except for a guy with tattooed lines streaked down his face like tears and the bluest eyes Four had ever seen and a man with a hulking figure that surely couldn’t be very good at parkour, hands the size of bowling balls and a gun hanging from his belt. The only one who carried one. Engel smiled wide.

“Well guys, this is Bill, the guy I’ve been telling you about for years.” A wink. “Bill, meet the crew. The scary fella over there is Axel, our gunman, and heavyweight. A bodyguard if you will.” Mr. Giant nodded slightly, his eyes focused on the street outside. “From left to right there’s Dima, Andrew, Andreas, Symon, Taras, Aleksander and the guy with the bad face tattoos is Mykola.” The latter frowned at Engel but didn’t say anything, before giving Four a shaky smile, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet.

Finally, Engel wound an arm around the girl and pulled her flush against his side.

“And this,” He bit his lip for a second. “Is the wonderful Oksana.”

She looked at Four with a smirk and he felt his knees go slightly weak.

“So this is the famous Bill.” She scrunched her nose. “Not a fan of the name, though. I think I’m gonna call you Will.” Engel frowned.

“Oh my g-d, Oksana you can’t just-”

“It’s fine!” Four cleared his throat, embarrassed. “I’m fine with Will.” Engel leveled an unimpressed stare at him.

“Fine, but you’ll be Bill to me. Now come on, I’ll show you the rest of the house.”

And so it was. The rest of the team stuck to calling him Bill, but that night when Oksana led him to her room instead of one of the communal rooms for the guys, she moaned the name Will.

Will. Will. Will.

Like a chant, soft and hoarse in his ear as her short, sharp nails drew blood from his back.

Will!

As she came, lovelier than anything else he had ever seen, her tan skin flushed all over.

It became a regular occurrence, more often than not he slept in her room and he stuck close to her wherever they went. At parties, he liked to have her closed, fingers grazing her elbow or her hip. When they stole something he usually kept her in his line of sight, more on edge than he had ever seen during a mission.

Of course, he still hung out with Engel. He was his best friend after all, but when the latter tried to go in for a kiss when they were sparring Four stopped him.

“It’s just, ya know, my thing with Oksana. You get it right?”

Engel stared at him and for the first time in a very long while, Four couldn’t decipher his expression.

“Yeah. I see how it is.”

The sparring ended quickly and awkwardly. Usually, Engel and Four fought as cleanly as they could, but at that moment, as Engel twisted his arm behind his back, straddling his hips, he was genuinely afraid he would break it.

“I win. See you later Bill.”

Four stared at his friend’s retreating back, genuinely wondering where he went wrong.

But it was okay. That night, Oksana took him to one of her favorite nightclubs and kissed his worries away. He felt like an idiot next to her, slow and lumbering, when she moved through crowds of people like a fish through water. Everywhere she went, she seemed to belong in a way he had never been able to. but she seemed to want him around and that helped.

And at some point, they started to spend nights upon nights just talking, about everything. Themselves, their childhoods, their wretched, awful childhoods. It was hard not to want when he was next to her. Not only want her but want to change to world for her, fix the injustices, the systems that had failed her, the streets that had sheltered her. Make her proud of him, like he had only ever wanted to make his mom proud.

Being with Oksana made him want everything.

Sometimes, he would whisper these dreams to her, like secrets, face pressed against the warmth of her sweat-slicked skin. She would laugh, quietly.

“You’re a dreamer, Will. I’m fine sticking to the earth while you search for the stars.”

She had always been much more realistic than him. She knew, that those dreams were nothing but fairytales. People like them didn’t accomplish miracles or even good things. He should have listened to her, maybe then the fall from the stars to the ground wouldn’t have hurt so much.

It was Oksana who took him to get his first and only tattoo, four big letters stretched across the knuckles of his right hand.

“What do they mean?”

“A letter for each of the people I have loved the most.”

M, for mum.

E, for Engel.

O, for Oksana.

And B, for the little boy he had once been, for the future his mother had seen in his eyes.

When Engel had seen the tattoo, he’d laughed himself to tears.

“Never get someone’s name or initials tattooed, Bill. It’s bad luck.”

And Engel was always right, wasn’t he?

A month later, they sat together, drinking. Oksana, was asleep, claiming cramps and a couple of the boys had gone out to a nightclub. It was just Andrew, Dima, Engel, and Four, drinking, a cigarette in each of their mouths. Usually, Engel was the best of them at drinking, but tonight he had been drinking much more than usual, taking generous swigs of two different bottles.

He kept asking Four about his relationship with Oksana, getting more and more aggressive with each drink he took. Finally, at four in the morning, he asked a question he’d been itching to ask, the words nearly flying out of his mouth without his permission.

“Aren’t you afraid of her?”

Four laughed, him? Scared of a small, cute girl like her?

But that wasn’t really what Engel was asking, was it? No, it went more along the line of, aren’t you afraid that you’ll fall in love? That you’ll give too much and she’ll take it without mercy? Aren’t you afraid that it’ll be too much, too fast, that you’ll be washed over by her tides?

Because girls like her, are the kind of girls who rip you open to feast on your heart and suck up your soul.

Because she had the power to ruin him.

This squirrely little girl, who looked like a gun made woman. His Oksana (except not his, never his), all muscles from climbing and starving, like him, all of them, street urchins forever and ever like his own group of lost boys.

“How could I be scared of her, I’m twice her size!” Andrew and Dima snickered, but Engel stayed silent, the flickering fire reflected in his eyes, casting strange shadows on his face.

“Whatever, Will” And he said the name like an insult, like a thrown stone. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you about her.”

“What’s his problem?” Asked Andrew and as Dima shrugged, Four took a gulp from the bottle of Rum at his feet and tried not to wonder how many times Oksana and Engel had slept together before he came to Ukraine.

From that moment on, he’d been expecting it, Oksana’s betrayal. Waiting for the fatal words to cross her lips: “I cheated on you” or even worse “I don’t love you anymore, I never did.”, asking himself if he would forgive her, shying away from the meaningful stares Engel shot at him and he dared not decipher.

And yet he was in love with her.

He could almost physically feel it, in the way he just seemed to breathe easier with her around him. In the way kissing her felt better than anything else in the world, that her presence brightened up a room. In the way he ached for her when she wasn’t with him.

He had killed for Engel, but he knew he would die for Oksana.

And they did stakeouts and ran to keep fit and listened to rumors. They kept stealing, here and there, but every single one of them was here for the big one. The necklace. Worth fifty million fucking dollars, the so-called “Garden of Kalahari” was even bigger than the Moussaief diamond. No matter how many participated in that robbery, they’d be set for life, and in this mission, the team was small. None of them could truly comprehend the amount of money the Kalahari was worth.

And it was going to be theirs.

There was a tension in the air, an itching in their veins, and at moments Four almost thought he could comprehend what had driven Zaccai to near-insanity. The feeling of adrenaline and expectation was nearly intoxicating. But still terrifying. The day almost snuck-up on them, there without warning. They had planned and re-planned a thousand times and yet, the Moussaief incident kept repeating itself in Four’s head. What if’s plagued him.

That morning, Oksana soothed him with a slow kiss.

“Welcome to the rest of our lives, Will.”

And so they went, the building was much older and unassuming than Moussaief’s home had been. But it made sense, the Kalahari belonged to an old rich woman, who hoarded her jewelry like a dragoness and who, after losing her businesses to younger more innovative competition, had let herself fall into poverty rather than sell her jewels.

Every morning she left the building unattended to go walk a decrepit old dog, both of them took nearly an hour for a short walk. More than enough time.

This group was much more acrobatic and parkour centered than the old one, so only the big guy, Axel, and Engel carried guns, the added weight wasn’t ideal for this kind of job. As soon as they walked into the building, Axel and Engel posted themselves at the door, guns drawn.

They had planned and re-planned a thousand times.

It wasn’t enough.

The first clue was the gunshots, the next one was the two heavy thuds by the door, Engel and Axel’s corpses falling to the floor. The final clue was Mykola shouting. Desperate, as if he wanted to tear his vocal cords out.

“Politsiya! Politsiya!”

Four never learned Ukrainian. He had meant to, he’d wanted to impress Oksana, but even he knew what the words meant.

When he found the Kalahari, it was almost like salvation. Maybe. Maybe, the mission hadn’t been for nothing.

More shots then, closer now, Four wasn’t keeping a head-count anymore. Just running, as fast as he could, until the oxygen burnt.

They were supposed to cross through the sign and he could barely comprehend when instead of doing that he was falling. Airborne. The only thing keeping him from certain death, from splattering like paint on the floor, was the too-thin cable in his hands. For the first time in a long, long time he was scared of falling.

And then she was there, Oksana. She grabbed the necklace and he knew that he was saved.

Except.

“Grab my hand! Grab my hand!”

His jaw hurt like nothing had hurt before, the jewels between his teeth felt like iron, like they would grind his molars to dust.

Oksana didn’t grab his hand. The look in her eyes was cold, empty, and Four felt himself go numb.

And then he was falling.

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#6 underground #six underground #billy #four #billytheskywalkerchallenge #billytheskywalker #writing challenge #writing #tw: child abuse #tw: sex #tw: death #tw: violence

[the-summer-of-like]

For Eternity

This is the first fan fiction i ever wrote, it's kinda.....ehhh, but imma do requests later on.

Gerard Way (my chemical romance) X Reader ((Vampire AU))

I run into my house and head straight down to my basement, literally just in time to avoid the sunrays landing on my pale skin. Shit, I need to be more careful. But it was worth it to see her. I lie on my bed and gasp for the oxygen I no longer need, purely out of habit. Once I calm down I go into the bathroom. I look into the mirror and hiss at the sight in front of me. I quite honestly look like shit. But I don’t care because I got to see her. I run the tap, collecting the water in my hands and washing my face of all the smears of her sweet blood and my smudged make up. Once I feel as though my skin is suitably clean I dry my face. I look in the mirror again and realise that my hair is still dirty. I decide that I should probably shower.

I leave the shower feeling suitably clean and am completely ready for bed. I wrap a towel around my waist and head into my basement-bedroom, instantly climbing under the quilt. My body accepts my deep tiredness from a long night. But seeing her was worth it. With her on my mind I fall into a heavy slumber.

She slowly advances to me, the moonlight making her shoulder length hair shine an even more blood red than I’d seen it before, the black tips at the ends only making the vibrancy of the red more prominent. The shaved sides add a contrast and make her look more… I don’t even know, but it is incredibly flattering to her beautiful bone structure. As she reaches me I have to resist the urge to comb my fingers through her hair. She looks up to me. Her gentle eyes are a beautiful pool of green outlined in a ring of cold. Her eyes are lightly rimmed in a black which, against her gentle skin tone, makes the green more inviting. She has a little nose ring which is cute, almost contradicting to how piercings are perceived. As her lips curve into a heart-warming, for anyone possessing a functioning heart that is, I can also see that she has piercings on either side of her bottom lip. Her snake bites just draw my attention to the soft curve of her plump lips. They look so gentle and loving.

“Hi,” she whispers, looking down to the ground, shy.

“Hi, I’m Gerard,”

“I’m (Y/N),” she gently replies. (Y/N), such a beautiful name. It is strange and seems as if it doesn’t fit in anywhere but in the best possible way. She fits the name, this gorgeous girl who appears to be different from everyone but not in a freaky way, in the most beautiful of ways. I place my fingers under her chin, lifting her head gently so that I can see her beautiful face again. I can only just smell her now. She smells divine. She smells like a mixture between a fresh bouquet and summer air. Her smell is intoxicating.

“Why did you come over, (Y/N)?” I ask with a smirk set across my features.

“I,” she begins, looking down again, only for me to lift her face with my fingers again, re-establishing eye contact. “I don’t really know. I felt like I had to. I felt as though I was meant to…” she trails off, chewing on one of her snake bites. “Does that make sense?” she asks, hope swimming in her eyes.

“Perfect sense,” I say before I lean down the five or so inches and connect my lips to her enticing soft ones.

She kisses back instantly and I feel that familiar hunger inside of me, a desire to feed. I try to control myself but I find myself biting and sucking on her plump bottom lip. To my surprise she doesn’t freak out. I feel her smile slightly against my lips before she starts to kiss back again.

She pulls back, needing oxygen. She smiles at me and runs her fingers over the small bites on her lip.

“Didn’t that… hurt?” I ask, concerned. Never had I bit someone who hadn’t cried in pain and had smiled. A smile signifies enjoyment and that isn’t something that has ever been present in one of my bite victims.

“Hurt? Are you serious? It was… I can’t explain it,” she trails off, smiling. “It was like you were injecting something into me that made every nerve light up. It was the best thing I’ve ever felt,” she says, a slow blush rising to her smooth cheeks. I can’t help but smile at that.

“That’s odd… but I am glad…” I say, clearly confused. “I know we just met but I think that…” I am cut off by a burn across my skin. I look up and see the sunrise. Shit. “I can’t explain but I have to go. If you want to see me again then meet me here, tonight at 11PM, okay?” I say as I rush off. I rush into my house and slump to the floor, my skin ablaze and covered in burns. That was far too fucking close.

“Gee?” Mikey calls from the kitchen where I can smell the coffee that he is making.

“Yeah?” I say before I hiss sharply, my skin is agitated and the pain is getting worse.

“Did you just get back?” he shouts, concern clear in his voice.

“Yep,” I whimper.

“Shit, Gee! You know you can’t do that shit!” Mikey shouts, rushing to my side. “Basement,” he orders and I comply, rushing into my cool basement. I sit in the corner, emerged in darkness. I feel the dark and cool air soothe my damaged body. “Why were you out so late?”

“I think I found her…” I reply, smiling even though he couldn’t see it.

“You found who, Gee?”

“My mate,” I say, grinning.

“Gee!” Mikey shouts. “Gee! GEE!!! GEE, WAKE UP!!!”

“Shit!” I yelp as I jump from my place in the bed. “What the fuck, Mikey? You ruined my favourite fucking dream!” I shout.

“Sorry, I just thought I’d wake you to tell you it’s dark…” he mutters, walking up the stairs and out of my basement. “Gee,” he says when he stops.

“What?” I ask grumpily.

“What dream?”

“The one about the night I met her,” I say fondly, smiling bright.

“Oh, right,” Mikey says, smiling back at me. “Sorry then,” he says as he leaves my room.

I decide to get up and get dressed, making sure that I am entirely ready for tonight. Tonight will be one of the most significant of my entire, eternal, existence. I am ready by 8PM and leave for the restaurant at 9PM, (Y/N) is meeting me there because she lives about three minutes from it so driving her made little sense.

I get to the restaurant and she isn’t there yet. I simply sit at our reserved table, trying to get my waistcoat neat and tie straight. As soon as she arrives I can smell it. That mixture of fresh bouquet and summer air is flooding my senses and I smile before I even see her. She soon finds the table and I stand to great her. I kiss her soft pink lips delicately and then gently nip on one of her snakebites, making her to giggle. I pull away from her, to keep this kiss decent in public, and pull her chair back for her. With a grateful smile, she sits in the chair gracefully.

“Hi,” she mutters, just as shy as the first night we’d met.

“Why are you still so shy around me? It’s been an entire year,” I say teasingly.

“I’ll make you a deal,” she says in her angelic voice. “I’ll stop being shy when you stop giving me butterflies,” she continues, looking up with a faint blush, causing me to chuckle.

The date goes as all of the others before it had, perfect. As we get onto dessert I decide that I should probably get my act together and just do it.

“So, umm… You’re my mate, right?” I say clumsily. (Y/N) laughs and nods at that. “Right, and we know everything about eachother and we love eachother, right?” I continue. (Y/N)'s laughter ceases and she looks at me compassionately and smiles, nodding again. “Well we’ve known eachother exactly a year and we both know that we are meant to be,” I say, pausing to grab her hand in mine. “I could never go on without knowing that your beautiful eyes will be there for me to gaze into. I could never go on without knowing that your silken hair will be there for me to run my fingers through. I could never go on without knowing that your soft lips will be there for me to kiss. I could never go on without knowing that you would be there with me,” I say and I can see tears well up in her bright eyes as she smiles lovingly at me, holding my hand tighter. “So, having said all of that, I wanted to ask you something,” I stand and get down on one knee, cliché I know. “Will you marry and bond with me, (Y/N)? Will you become my wife for all of eternity?” I ask, reaching into my pocket to retrieve the platinum ring, with a diamond atop and engraving inside which read ‘I promise to love you for as long as we both shall live, eternity’. (Y/N) still hasn’t responded. She is just gazing into my eyes and clutching my hand. (Y/N)? Will you?” I ask, nervously.

“Of course I will, Gerard,” she says, smile wide and bright. I smile back and slip the ring onto her finger. We stand and I instantly capture her soft lips in a meaningful and loving kiss. I reluctantly pull away to allow Talia to breathe.

“I love you,” I whisper as I cup her soft face in my hands. “I love you so much, (Y/N),” I repeat.

“I love you too, Gerard, for eternity,”

[xxfanfiction-emo-trinityxx]

Love is Love - Gerard Way x Reader

Request: I need,,,, more Punk!Gerard in my life,,,, okay but seriously- can I request a Punk!Gerard fic? Also can the reader be male and can it be angst?? Thankies bro!! Take your time on it!!!!

Reader: male

Warnings: homophobic slurs, Spoiler Alert for ‘Love Simon’

Word count: 3 424

A/N: I watched ‘Love Simon’ (so spoiler alert) a while ago and got seriously upset about his friends’ behavior after he got outed. And I wanted to put things right in a way, because there has to be some weird shit going on with me if I don’t befriend the forcibly outed kid when I notice none of their friends are around.

Your eyes flickered over the screen again and again, not able to believe what you were reading. You reloaded the page, just to be sure, but the black letters were still clearly being displayed on the school’s anonymous confession website.

“Gerard Way is a fag”

You were not sure which part of the statement was disturbing you the most. Obviously this was not the way someone wanted to come out. You would not want to come out like that at least. So someone had outed this boy, probably without his consent. Someone who was, judging by the word they had chosen, homophobic.

It was no secret that your school was not the most LGBT+ friendly ground in town, but it still disgusted you. And then there was that name. You had never really talked to Gerard before, but you knew he was in art class with one of your friends. Apparently he was pretty good a drawing. And he would definitely not have been on top of your ‘who might be gay but not out’-list. You did not really have a list, neither on paper nor in your mind, but Gerard really was not within the first twenty names you would have said if someone had asked you who you thought was gay on your school. Of course you could not just look at people and tell if they were homosexual, but being gay yourself, you would have expected some sort of instinct or something kick in. Apparently not.

Anyway, Gerard was one of the lonely punk students at your school. You knew he had a brother, Mikey, but he was younger and not yet on the same school, his friend Ray had moved away before summer break and other than him you had never seen anyone talk to Gerard.

You wondered if he knew. Did he just sit in front of his laptop, like you? Was his heart beating faster, his chest imploding, tears falling down his cheeks? You knew that would be your reaction if someone outed you, especially like that.  ‘Gerard Way is a faggot’, who would write, say, or even think something like that? Had people no respect for each other? Why could some people not just accept that love is love? On the other hand, you knew why you were not out. Because there were too many people who were not tolerant, and you were not even sure if your friends would have your back.

~*~

You had kind of hoped that Gerard’s sexuality would not be topic number one when you walked to school with your friends on the first day of the new school year. But the post was barely a week old, and people were too excited to see Gerard, now that they knew this thing about him, that seemed to change the way they looked at him. Idiots.

The lunch room was as crowded as you remembered. People pushed around and tried to get their favorite spots in the room. You sat at a table close to the door, a warm breeze of late summer air blowing past your bare arms.  

“Okay, but seriously? I always thought something was weird about him,” your friend Gina declared, placing her tablet down next to yours and sliding into the bench, her knee brushing against yours.

“But he a girlfriend last year, right,” Paul, another one of your friends replied, making space for Mark, the fourth in the group.

“Imagine how she must be feeling right now,” he said, looking across the hall to where the girl was sitting.

“Imagine how he must be feeling right now,” you answered, not being able to stay quiet any longer. “Imagine some ass posts something so personal about you, how would you feel?”

Your blood was boiling, had been since you had seen that post last week, but within the last hours, you really, really had gotten very angry. Especially at whoever had submitted that post. And since the submission box of the website posted automatically, no one had checked it before it had been thrown out there, probably ruining this poor boys holiday, if not even high school time.

“It’s something people deserve to know though,” Mark shrugged.

“Deserve? What’s wrong with you man,” you wanted to jump up, shout, shake some sense into your friend, but you had to stay calm. “What next? Should everyone wear a sign around their neck, saying ‘straight’, or ‘gay’ or ‘bi’ or ‘pan’ or whatever?”

“Well, he’s just trying to say it’s not normal,” Paul jumped in, making you even angrier.

“Normal? Of course it’s normal, it’s love. Love’s normal. It’s just not as common,” you argued. Shit, you were seriously upset now. You felt personally attacked. And how should you not? They were basically insulting you. They just did not know it.

“It’s just a little freakish,” Gina said, definitely not helping.

“Freakish, how can-“

In that moment all noise around you stopped. People grew quiet and the white noise of clicking forks against porcelain faded, everyone staring at the door. Confused you turned around as well, and were met with the sight of a very pale Gerard Way. His long, black hair fell into his eyes, his shoulders were slumped and his black jacket was pulled tightly around his body, like a shield. He looked so lost and even a little scared, it broke your heart. And for the first time you noticed how pretty he actually was. It was a macabre beauty, dark circles under his eyes, greasy hair, looking a like a beaten dog, but he was beautiful. He would probably look breathtaking if he had a good night’s sleep, a little bit of sunlight, and a shower. You wondered what his smile looked like, if his eyes would sparkle along, before realizing that now was probably one of the worst moments to realize you had just started crushing on him. After all you just had a discussion about homophobia with your friends.

About a hundred pairs of eyes followed the pale boy as he walked over to the serving counter and paid for a plate with pasta. Slowly the conversations started picking back up, but your eyes still followed Gerard. He looked around for a moment before sitting at the end of a table, a few seat away from a group of seniors. They stuck their heads together, before they all got up, carrying their full tablets to the next table. You wanted to run over and scream at them, but you stayed seated, instead just throwing another glance at Gerard. His head hung low, hair covering his face. And then you realized he was alone. No one sat with him. No one was there to talk to him, to comfort him.

“Look who’s in the house! It’s our faggot!” someone, doubtlessly one of the brainless jocks, screamed through the room, earning laughs left and right. Even your three friends laughed. “Wanna suck my dick?”

Enough was enough, you decided. Without another word, ignoring the questions of your friends, you got up and grabbed your tablet. Your mind was clouded with rage as you walked over to the almost empty table. Only the loud slamming of your plastic tablet against the table pulled you back into reality.

Gerard’s head shot up at the noise, wide, hazel eyes staring up at you in fear. You ignored him and sat down in front of him, continuing your lunch without a word. When he was still staring at you after almost a minute you looked up.

“This seat is not taken, is it,” you asked, lifting your eyebrows.

A smile tucked at Gerard’s lips. Holy shit, he looked beautiful when he smiled.

“It is now,” he answered, his cheeks hinting at a tinge of pink.

“Good,” you said, smiling back at him before you continued eating.

~*~

You only realized that you had not thought of the consequences of your actions during the following days. After you had had lunch in silence, you finally started talking to Gerard, about art and music, about your families, about anything but his sexuality or his outing. And you noticed how much you had in common, yet how different you were.

During the following days, you started to hang out more with Gerard, during school, and after school. And what else would you have expected than an increasing number of homophobic slurs being thrown your way. Of course everyone assumed you were gay now, just because you hung out with someone who was. They were not wrong, but the rudeness, the unacceptance, the brutality of their words hurt you more than you wanted to admit to yourself.

So you stayed strong, during school at least. Gerard had it a lot worse than you, so you stayed strong for him. He sometimes told you to stay away from him, for your own sake, but you just laughed at that.

In fact it turned out that it had become impossible for you to stay away from him. A force stronger than gravity drew you towards him, and while you tried to convince yourself that you were not already head over heels for the dark haired punk, deep down you knew that that was a lie.

 So you found yourself lying awake at night. The insults of the day made your throat tighten, your eyes burn and your heart heavy, but then you remembered Gerard, looked at the glowing display of your mobile portraying his profile picture, and you knew it was worth it.

It was yet another sleepless night, the bright screen of your mobile illuminating your face, when suddenly the door to your room slowly opened. You sat up in your bed, trying to spy through the darkness.

“(Y/n), are you still awake,” you heard the familiar voice of your mother whisper.

“Yeah, you can come in,” you answered, turning on the light on your bedside table.

Your mother was living alone with you in the small house, and judging by the time your alarm clock displayed she had just come home from her shift in the hospital where she worked as a nurse.

“Everything okay, dear,” she asked, stepping into the room. Doubtlessly she had noticed your red eyes as she strode over to the bed and sat down on the blanket next to you.

“Yeah- I mean… not really, it’s just-“ you took a deep breath. You had thought these words through countless times, always thought how you wanted to come out to her, when, with which words. “Did I tell you about Gerard?”

“He’s a new friend of yours, right,” she recalled correctly.

“Yes, he- ahm… he’s gay, you know,” you carefully watched your mother’s expression as you told her about Gerard’s sexuality, but she just listened without showing any sign of emotional reaction. “He got outed during the last week of holidays, and… well, school’s pretty much hell for him right now.”

She nodded understandingly.

“The first day after holidays, he was sitting alone at lunch, and literally everyone stared at him, or talked about how being gay is freakish, and I just got… so… angry. So I went to sit with him, and yeah, that’s how I know him.”

“That was nice of you, I’m sure he’s glad to have you,” you mother told you, gently patting your arm when she noticed how upset you were about that topic.

“But since we started hanging out… people… they think I’m gay too, and I get all these insults and all this… I don’t even know what to call it… hate? I walk through a corridor, and people just yell stuff, so Gerard asked me to stop hanging out with him, so I wouldn’t get… you know, hurt,” you stuttered. You didn’t want to stop hanging out with Gerard, you didn’t want to stop being friends with him. You wanted to get to know him better, you wanted to be closer to him, you wanted so much more than just friendship, but he tried to push you away. And you had to share your thoughts with someone, and your mother was the best choice for that, at least at the moment. But first of all you had to tell her something else, something that was bigger than the thing with Gerard.

Your mother was still thinking about your words, quietly nodding when you continued, your throat tight, your voice wet from tears.

“I’m in love with him,” you confessed, biting your lip so it would not quiver, “I’m in love with Gerard, mum. And I’ve been in love with other boys before. I’m, I’m-“

You couldn’t say it. Something inside you fought against that word, that label. Love is love, why did you have to label yourself?

“You are my son,” your mother finished the sentence for you. “You are my son and you are beautiful and perfect and I feel very honored that you talk to me about these things.”

She wrapped her arms around you, pulling you into an embrace. Her shirt still smelled of the disinfectant of the hospital, a smell that reminded you of your childhood. She patted your back for a while, whispering how proud she was of you.

“So…” you pulled away, your face heated from crying, your eyes burning and your voice hoarse. “About Gerard, what do you think should I do?”

“What do you want to do,” your mother asked back.

You watched her, expected her to look differently at you now that you had come out, like all the people looked differently at Gerard now. But she just looked at you like she always had, with so much love in her eyes, the way only a mother can look at you.

“I want to be with him,” you told her, and you really, really wanted to be with him.

“Then tell him, tell him exactly that,” she smiled and patted your knee while you nodded.

“You knew, didn’t you,” you suddenly realized. “You knew I’m into boys.”

A mysterious smile played around her lips. “Not really, I suspected it sometimes.”

~*~

For the first time in this school year you felt actually confident when you entered the school building. You would tell Gerard how you felt about him, that you wanted him to be your boyfriend, to be his boyfriend. If he said no? Okay, not cool, but you could deal with that. You wouldn’t just leave him alone in the mess that he was in due to him being outed. You would stay by his side, if he wanted that. And if he felt the same way? Then you would probably die of a heart attack, but that would be worth it.

You had showered and put on your favorite deodorant, your worn out Smashing Pumpkins shirt and some comfortable jeans. You felt ready to deal with whatever fate threw your way. Until you reached Gerard’s locker.

Black spray paint letters spelled out the words ‘fag’ and ‘cocksucker’. You wanted to vomit. For a while you stood next to Gerard who stared at his locker in silence. At first you felt paralyzed. You wanted to wish the slurs away, wanted to rip the door of the locker off and beat these bastards up with it, you wanted to delete all memory of this from Gerard’s brain. But none of this was within the range of your capacity, so once you had stared at the locker for long enough, you grabbed Gerard’s wrist and dragged him to the director’s office.

It turned out to be a long conversation. The director listened to your story, which you told from the beginning, just to make sure he understood everything. Gerard just sat in his chair, head hanging low, wishing to be invisible. Then the director made Gerard tell his side of the story. The man in the big chair said some well-meant words of encouragement and told you that there was nothing he could do.

You stared at him disbelievingly.

“Are you seriously telling me that you can do nothing against bullies who insult and hurt and mentally scar one of your students,” you asked, totally forgetting who you were talking to.

“You don’t say it, maybe not even think it consciously, but somewhere inside this messed up brain of yours there is this rule that states that homosexuals, probably transgender kids as well, are worth less than your ‘normal, everyday’ student” you drew the quotation marks into the air. “You know who was gay? Oskar Wilde, and you teach his literature in school. You know who else was gay? Alan Turing, the father of modern computers. Hell, Turing even killed himself because of the way society treated him. And now everyone pities him. Do you really want to be the kind of person who tells a kid they’re sick, or a freak or whatever fucked up insult your mind comes up with? Do you want to be the one who stands in front of the world, declaring love is wrong? Because that’s all it is, love. Being gay is loving, being bi is loving, being lesbian is loving! It’s just the ‘wrong gender’ you love. Wrong the fuck! It’s society that’s wrong if they think love can ever be wrong. Not talking about pedophiles or the fucked up abusive kind of love, I’m talking about mutual love. And maybe it hasn’t come to your notice yet, but if you think discriminating against gays is some hip trend, then surprise! It’s not and your views are obsolete. The UK, Germany, Australia, Sweden, France, countless other countries, do you know what they have in common? Same sex marriages are legalized. The states too, by the way. Because these governments seem to get what neither you, nor your homophobic student body, get: that it’s just love after all, and that’s the bloody truth!”

There was a stunned silence after you had spoken, and for a moment you were afraid that you would get suspended or something, but then the director nodded and agreed before promising he would take care of the matter.

When you were finally out of the stuffy office, standing in an empty corridor, you took a deep breath. You could feel Gerard’s eyes on you, so you looked over at him.

“Those were some pretty powerful words in there,” he complimented with a smirk, a smirk that was so soft and gentle and adoring that you wanted to kiss him here on the spot.

“Thanks,” you smiled.

“It almost sounded like… please don’t take this the wrong way, like you knew what you were talking about.”

“Being afraid of getting hurt for loving someone of the same gender,” you wondered and he nodded. “Well… let’s say it was pretty easy since the person I love sat right next to me.”

Gerard’s eyes widened for a moment as he realized the meaning of your words and he gasped for air.

“You, you are… you-“ A smile brighter than any you had seen before spread over his face, lighting up the whole room.

“I’m gonna kiss you now, if that’s okay,” you told him, unable to keep your own grin under control.

When Gerard nodded furiously, you gently took his face into your hands and pressed your lips against his. They were soft, tasted a bit of Tabaco and coffee. Your heart was hammering in your chest and you were running out of breath faster than you liked. Your head was spinning and you hoped that holding onto Gerard’s face was enough to keep you standing. When you pulled away, he chuckled slightly.

“Technically I was sitting on your left,” he whispered into your ear.

Confused you turned your head to look at him, almost forgetting what you wanted to say as you met his beautiful, shining eyes.

“What?”

“You said ‘the person you love sitting right next to you’, but I sat on your left,” he winked.

“Idiot,” you giggled, gently nudging his shoulder, “you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah I do,” Gerard agreed, sounding incredibly pleased knowing that his feelings were being returned.

In that moment the bell rang and you heard chairs being moved around on the floor, and chatter growing louder behind the still closed doors.

Warm, soft fingers intertwined with yours, making your heart flutter.

“Shall we,” Gerard asked.

You leant forward, pressing your lips against his again quickly before the first doors flung open and revealed you to the rest of the students.

“Yeah, let’s show ‘em how it’s done.”

#gerard way x reader #gerard way #gerard way fluff #gerard way x reader fluf #gerard way x reader fluff #male!reader #punk!gerard #high school #high school au #coming out #fanfiction #fanfic #cute #fluff #support

[gyromitra-esculenta]

Synchronicity 9

Fear!AU. The mind-fuck episode. AKA The Vent, the ghosts, and conspiracy.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

(...)“Well, ain’t that a bloody good question, at that, luv?” Lena snickers from the left and slides up her goggles. Each of her movements leaves electric blue lines fading slowly in the air. There are bullet holes in her throat, her right eye is missing from its socket, and her uniform is stained black at the midsection. “I reckon the knobhead really wants you to notice him, Jackie.”(...)

***

(…)

Ghosts of the past always tend to revisit

Rarely will they come bearing gifts of forgiveness

And from the streets to the wars, so much violence he made

(…)

The corridor Jack steps into is unsettling, the long stretch of the polished marble with dark blue columns turned almost black in the dim red light that filters through an arched glass roof overhead. He knows it does not belong here, in this place, it has been ripped out from somewhere else – a memory, his own or Reaper’s – and put here for him to stumble in, purposefully, or by accident maybe.

He swallows and checks the shotgun’s chamber. Three more shots. His footsteps echo in the silence, the only other sounds his own breath and the rustle of his clothes. The door made out of the frosted glass on the other side of the corridor slowly crawls further away from him with every bit of advance made. The tall grass that tickles his palm does not surprise him in the least.

Psychic shock. Hallucinations. Withdrawal. Crazy or not.

“I know you’re here,” Jack stops and defiantly calls out, shotgun lowered, teeth clenched. “Come out. Tell me what do you want from me…”

“I’m always here, Sunshine,” the Beast laughs and with a rushing trickle, the grass drowns in rising liquid, black sludge slowly creeping up until he stands up to his hips in it. It’s warm, detestably so, steaming in the air turned unexpectedly cold. “Now more than ever because, let’s face it, Sunshine, you need me.”

It’s blood. A river of blood. Jack trudges forward against the strengthening current that threatens to take him with it.

“No. Not you. You’re… you’re a part of me. Him.”

“I was, and always be, a part of you, Sunshine,” the Beast’s whisper fades when a claw traces the scar on his face, with care, sadness maybe, and Reaper comes closer, the expression on the ever-changing face struggling to keep its shape inscrutable. Jack holds his breath. The skin is cold to touch, clammy, and the smell of decomposing flesh surrounds them.

“They will all pay for what they did to us. For what they did to him.” The voice changes, travels, sounds from different points in space.

In a way, it is reassuring, the knowledge that he is merely a surrogate for someone already gone, Jack thinks when the surging current, a wave of rolling darkness, knocks him over and dunks him under the surface. The whole world reorients itself along some axis, the turn of perception dizzying, and he presses his palm against the glass door.

Something in the darkness beyond the threshold screams, long anguished soundless wails reverberating in his chest like a sound wave underwater, more felt than heard. He cannot even start to imagine how anything – anyone – can produce sounds like these, with such suffering forced into each single tone, and still live. Still exist.

He pushes on the frosted glass. Vertigo makes him sway on his legs when the reality again stretches and crashes into his senses. Jack wipes the blood away from his nose with his wrist and duly notes that the open gash on his forearm is gone, and only an angry jagged – slightly raised – pink line is left behind.

He is standing next to the vent, the floor and the wall around it are littered with angry red scribbles, fingerpainted, manic, disjointed, but from that chaos, order emerges the longer he stares at it. Letters and numbers form amino-acid sequences and equations, organic reactions reimagining themselves into something living in his mind.

“The formula to create you, Sunshine,” the Beast purrs. “The recipe for making more of you.”

And above all of that, a question, meticulously formulated, blood still fresh and uncoagulated: ‘Can he truly see him?’.

“Well, ain’t that a bloody good question, at that, luv?” Lena snickers from the left and slides up her goggles. Each of her movements leaves electric blue lines fading slowly in the air. There are bullet holes in her throat, her right eye is missing from its socket, and her uniform is stained black at the midsection. “I reckon the knobhead really wants you to notice him, Jackie.”

Jack feels the inevitability weigh down on him, something constricts his throat. He shakes his head as if to clear his mind. His fingertips brush against the wall and smear the blood.

“Now, luv, don’t go shellshocked on my behalf, there’s still a lot of fecking ground to cover,” Lena rolls her remaining eye. “I could do without you going full nutter.”

“How?” Jack swallows, bending down to peer into the vent.

“Does it matter?” Her hand rests on his head. Fingers soothingly card through his hair. “All soldiers are is lambs led to slaughter. Future banquet for worms. Monsters bred to create monsters. A neverending cycle.”

“Yes. It matters. To me.” Jack crouches and almost balks at the stench of fresh viscera and its spilled contents coming from inside.

“Now, Sunshine,” the Beast hisses, “you’ve smelt worse.” Yes, yes, he had, so he slips inside. The light on his visor illuminates metallic lining of the duct. Jack tentatively moves forward on all fours. Lena is beside him.

“You tell me, luv. You ditched the meds, didn’t you? I’m just a bloody fidget of your broken mind, you duffer. What was that thing Shrike said? Psychic shock, luv.” She smiles, white teeth glinting from the corner of her mouth. “So, in all probability, I’m telling you what you want to hear. What you already believe. Or what the wankiest of them all wants you to believe.”

His hand lands with a squelch in something wet. He doesn’t look and sidles – as far as he can, pressed into aluminum wall – past the lower half of a body. Ripped intestines hang down over the ridges of torn muscle.

“So, Jack, luv,” Lena laughs, “don’t keep him waiting. Remember your training. See him for what he is,” she adds somberly, her nails dig into his scalp. “You need to see him. You need to forget your fear.”

An opening, down into another corridor, and now he does not need to wonder where the other half of the body went, it lays just below. Jack swallows and positions himself gripping the edge of the vent, then slowly lowers himself and swings.

He lands with a soft thump, crouched. Everything is silent. Too silent. He has the uncanny feeling that someone watches him through the eye of the camera on the wall, someone hostile, someone with an agenda differing from his own.

Jack looks back at the vent and Lena smiles at him. She pulls down her goggles and gives him thumbs-up, then disappears from his sight.

He inspects the shotgun again. Three shots. The knife is in its holster, the Seegert too. The vest seems to have the integrity intact. The closest exit is reinforced, the card reader again glaring red at him, so he passes it. Around the corner, another camera observes each his step.

“Yes, Sunshine,” the Beast walks with him. “Someone prepared the way for you. I wonder what was his intention.”

There are bodies in dark-colored hospital scrubs littering the floor. Red cross on the wall. He feels no compassion towards them, not anymore. There are singular piles of ash. He tries not to step on them.

The path leads him through another set of cubicles. The feeling of scrutiny makes him paranoid and he glances up at the camera in the corner of the ceiling, catching the briefest glint of movement. Why? He turns, inspecting the office space.

The PDA sitting precariously on the edge of the desk flickers in the dim of the room, the blue glow of the screen bathing immediate surroundings in an eerie light. Jack slowly approaches and takes a hold of it even if every shred of his instinct screams danger. It smells like an intricate trap he’s entering willingly.

The datapad still receives transmission and is logged into the secure network of the facility. He wonders how unlikely it is the little fact the whole infrastructure is still standing got overlooked by Gerard. There is always one position highlighted and he quickly swipes through several menus along the path left for him until his finger hesitates and slowly moves from ‘Blackwatch Personnel’ to ‘Replica Project’ – and then to ‘Subject 76 Field Test’.

“There is no need, Sunshine,” the Beast murmurs, “for you to read this.”

“Why?” It surges around his wrist yet remains silent except for a hushed hiss bubbling just under its surface, so Jack opens the file. The letters seem to quiver on the faintly glowing screen.

‘I’d like to recommend that the next time there is a need for Blackwatch personnel to supervise any kind of prototype testing, they are reminded of proper protocols for handling the test subjects. Proper handling would have prevented the unfortunate loss of several soft assets.

While most of the protocols were breached during the incident, we can deem the field test in its entirety as sufficiently successful, especially because of the issues revealed. There is a need to develop a more secure method of establishing and ending the connection of our subjects to Reaper as it seems that the incident was initiated rather spontaneously without prior activation of Subject 76, due to the physical trauma the specimen underwent.’

Something cold is crawling down his spine and his breath grows short. The letters on the screen start to swim, but that’s because his hands are trembling, Jack idly notices from somewhere beside himself.

‘During the five-minute twenty-two seconds long synchronization event, Subject 76 barehanded had dispatched four acting members of Blackwatch and gravely wounded another two (see attached footage). The specimen itself suffered several combat injuries, none lessening its combat eligibility in the long run after proper recuperation period. The other injuries that lead to the test subject’s activation correspond with…’

He cannot read anything else, the words run together and transform into smears on the screen. It does not matter because there are hands at his throat and his lungs burn when he tries to draw a breath. He drops the PDA and claws panicked at his neck trying to pry them off.

Cold fingers cover his eyes and something – someone – physical stands behind him, the other hand guiding his wrists down away from his bared bloodied throat.

“I’m here,” the voice is distant and distorted, hoarse. “You don’t need to know this. You shouldn’t know this.”

For a brief moment, the darkness that envelops him is comforting, and Jack slowly breathes to the rhythm of the ever-present sluggish beat.

#sometimes i write #fear!AU #r76 #reaper76 #proper part #gore #i guess #i swear we are getting closer to the end of the hospital